Delphi complete works of.., p.749
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 749
The establishment of the Jesuits at this date was only a large church and one small house, but their beautiful gardens occupied the north end of Notre Dame Street where it met the Rue St. Charles, a space which is now represented by the Court House, the City Hall, and the Champ de Mars, with Jacques Cartier Square opposite. Nothing in the present Jesuit establishment in Montreal (Collège Ste. Marie) and the beautiful Collège Brébeuf behind the mountain corresponds to the site of this earlier foundation. The order was suppressed by the Pope in 1772. After the death of the last surviving Jesuit in Canada, Father Cazot, in 1800, the estates of the order lapsed to the Crown. The papal ban was lifted in 1814, but the Jesuits did not return to Canada till 1839, when their own Montreal premises had been long since turned to other uses.
The Daughters (Sisters) of the Congregation of Notre Dame spoken of by Charlevoix are now the great teaching order whose schools for girls extend over North America. They date from Marguerite Bourgeoys (1653) and the foundation already described. In Charlevoix’s time, and long after, their establishment was at the junction of Notre Dame and St. Jean Baptiste with spacious grounds adjoining those of the Hotel Dieu on St. Paul Street below. In 1853 they bought the beautiful country property of “Monklands,” for a brief time previously the residence of the Governor General of Canada and the scene, as told below, of Lord Elgin’s tribulation at the time of the Montreal riots (1849). From that they moved into the spacious abode on Sherbrooke Street West, built for them in 1908. “In the lower town,” writes Charlevoix, by which, of course, he means St. Paul Street, “are the Hotel Dieu, the royal magazines, and the Place d’Armes.” By this Charlevoix does not mean the Place d’Armes of today. At the time of his visit the old Market Place was also called the Place d’Armes, as appears on the map of the royal engineer, M. de Catologne, of 1723. It opened off St. Paul Street on the riverside between St. François Xavier and St. Joseph (St. Sulpice) streets. “Here also,” he says, “is the quarter in which the merchants for the most part have their trade.” These merchants represented, overwhelmingly, the fur trade, and oddly enough the fur trade, such as it is, is there still after two hundred years, strung out in dingy but venerable old wholesale houses surviving on St. Paul Street.
The Hotel Dieu was still in the same location as the original Hotel Dieu of Jeanne Mance, but the first building had been burned in 1695. There was still standing Maisonneuve’s house, occupied after his departure by the Sulpicians. It lasted until destroyed in 1852. The (old) Market Place just mentioned was not only a market but a grim theater of justice where stood the gallows, the pillory, and the jail. Here executions were held. Here (in 1752) a criminal guilty of a revolting murder was put to the terrible death of being broken on a wheel. His body was buried outside the town, under what is now Guy Street. The spot was marked with a cross. When Guy Street was made the cross was moved into the grounds of the Grey Nunnery beside it.
Such relentless “justice” was rare in the colony. As a rule pity intervened. The Negress who set fire to the town in 1734 was sentenced to be burned alive; instead, they hanged her and burned her dead. Let it be recalled that at a date, almost as late as this, in New York Province a man was burned alive by sentence of law.
Beyond the Market Place again, and across the little Rivière St. Pierre, there stood the house built by Callières in 1672. Near by was the General Hospital, a work of piety at large, founded in 1688 by François Charron for the care of the sick and the infirm and for the instruction of youth.
“There has been for some years a project,” says Charlevoix, “for walling Montreal around. But it will not be an easy matter to bring the inhabitants to contribute to it.” The fortification began next year with the demolition of the old palisades and works and the construction of a stone wall all around the city. The walls were eighteen feet high, four feet thick at the base and three at the top. The gates and sally ports were protected by bastions. But the opposition of the townspeople toward paying a contribution of six thousand livres (francs) toward the cost of fortification was far more reasonable than Charlevoix realized. They were a generation bred to war and knew all about it. The proposed fortifications were of a kind to repel a direct attack of savages, the height of the wall and the projection of the bastions rendering it easy to guard the gates. But the townspeople were now too numerous and too well armed to fear Indian attack. Against attack by artillery the walls were useless. The event was to prove it forty years later.
It was just after Charlevoix’s visit (June 1721) that a great fire swept the lower part of the town. Accidentally started in the Hotel Dieu, it not only destroyed that edifice itself but with it about 126 houses, or half the town. In a sense the fire, as is so often the case in rising cities, was a blessing in disguise. It encouraged the building of stone houses, though Montreal remained mostly of wood till the conquest; it led to attempts to straighten and widen streets and to adopt some rudimentary fire protection. The inadequacy of this was shown, however, when a second fire, that of 1734, destroyed the newly built Hotel Dieu and with it a large part of the lower town, forty-six houses. The Hotel Dieu built at the first settlement (1644) had been burned down, it will be recalled, in 1695, so that the building now erected and occupied until 1861 was the fourth occupied. The Hotel Dieu of today, on Pine Avenue, replaced it in 1861.
The fire of 1734 was started, as said above, as an act of vengeance by a slave woman. We so seldom connect slavery with French Canada that it is with surprise we learn that slavery was perfectly legal and that there were slaves there all through the French Regime, and for a generation into the British. The French government wisely prevented any general slave trade of import from Africa, as they thought slave labor unsuited to the colony. But people, rich enough, brought in Negroes as house servants, and there was a certain importation of “Panis” (commonly written Pawnees), a peculiar race of Western Indians captured and sold to the French outposts and, by an exception among their race, soft enough to work. The Iroquois wasn’t. Like the British he “never, never” would be a slave.
Not only was there slavery, but Montreal, all through this period, was a place of class distinction and social inequality. French historians who speak of the colonial simplicity of New France are speaking of it only in a relative way, as compared with the social setting of Versailles, where noble birth was estimated in quarterings and noble blood by the quarter pint. Longfellow, in his Evangeline, has given a picture of the other New France, that Acadia on the Bay of Fundy, where “even the richest was poor and the poorest had in abundance,” and where class distinction was unknown. This may have been true of Acadia. It was not true of Montreal. Almost, if not quite, in its earliest days social distinctions appeared. It is true that in the mission days of Ville Marie there was the common equality of prayer, the common devotion of the spirit; and there was, in the Iroquois wars, the common equality of danger, the brotherhood of combat. But as danger passed and security grew, social distinctions reasserted themselves. There was nothing in the spirit of the time to stop them. The distinctions of birth brought from France were maintained, so too the distinction of wealth as brought out by individual colonists; the whole seignorial system was one of class, the holder of a seigneurie outranking the holder of a fief noble, and both of them above an arrière fief, and all far above the peasant (en roture) on a plot of land. If one adds to this the new inequalities that came with fortunes of expanding trade, we can easily see that New France was not a place where everybody was as good as everybody else. Indeed such places, even in America, were still hard to find. New England had its gentle and simple; even Pennsylvania had its degrees of piety, and in Virginia inequality grew as easily as tobacco.
There was added the existence of a governing class, since there was no popular election. The Governor General, visiting Montreal from Quebec, the Intendant, the Governor of Montreal, and the military officers were at the top. With them were a number of appointed officials, people with many functions but no real authority, what the French call officials à façade, like a big shop front clapped on a little shop. All these people, seigneurs, Governors, officers, and officials ranked above the people still called “the vulgar.”
Yet here, as in all North America in early days, the poor had at least the escape to the land and to the woods. In a new open country, with land still free and the woods empty, industrial poverty can never take so cruel an aspect as it later assumes. When the land is gone and the woods are closed industrial poverty becomes a prison. There is no way out. Most of all was such escape ready and easy in Montreal. For the fur trade was at the door and the woods beyond, and the adventurous might go forth, or the “habitant” turn to a coureur des bois, or even the idle “go Indian.”
Apart from the slaves the population of French Canada was almost entirely French. A few British drifted in, chiefly as prisoners of war who stayed on after the peace, Roman Catholics who found the environment congenial. These married French girls. Their unpronounceable English names were converted by current convenience to the sound of flowing French. Ordinary people couldn’t spell. The notaries wrote the new names by ear. The language of these incomers disappeared in their family, and in the course of generations nothing but tradition connected them with British descent. It seems doubtful whether all the “Sylvains” of Montreal today (there are about sixty of them) are aware that their name is Sullivan. A good many of the two hundred “Phaneufs” may not know that this name began as Farnsworth, in the person of an ancestor prisoner of war in about 1700. The French Canadians from the beginning until today may be reckoned as a singularly unmixed stock.
The fur trade represented the chief, practically the only “business,” the main economic support, of New France and the mainstay of Montreal as its chief emporium. It was carried on partly by direct trade into the city and brought with it the perplexed problem of the Indian and his firewater. There were, as usual, stringent regulations which avarice, as usual, sought to circumvent. Other trade came down from outlying posts as far back as Michilimackinac. Its speculative nature and the life of adventure that the fur trade involved gave it an irresistible attraction. It drew the young men from their settlements to the woods and thus, while seeming to enrich, in reality impoverished the colony and undermined its existence. French Canada had rich farmlands that it never used, not only along the Richelieu but in those eastern townships hard by, the richest land of the province of Quebec, untouched till the days of the Loyalists. Higher up the St. Lawrence was the still more fertile Upper Canada (Ontario) with the garden territory of the Niagara district and the western peninsula, which the military power of France, if really exercised, could easily have seized and held, to make it a land as luxuriant as France itself. Nor was farming all. Beside Three Rivers was iron ore from which a feeble and halfhearted operation produced rude instruments. For shipbuilding all the material was at hand. Shipyards such as those established by the English a hundred years later could have proved the salvation of both old France and new. A few ships indeed were built, but the models were unsuitable, the timber was ill chosen, and for lack of patience and experience the shipbuilding of New France proved a failure.
This misdirection of economic life was clear to the wiser of the French themselves. There is preserved a report of Raudot, an Intendant of 1706, in which he says, “The English do not leave their homes as most of our people do; they till their ground, establish manufactures, open mines, build ships, and have never yet looked upon the fur trade as anything but a subordinate part of their commerce.”
With the fur trade of the period went the continual exploration that was at once the guiding star and the will-o’-the-wisp of French Canada. The sequel showed the country utterly inadequate for the support of its vast and imposing claims on the territory of North America. But to these French explorers still belongs the honor of their achievement. The chief name is that of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye, whose family belonged to Three Rivers but whose enterprises, in which his sons participated, were conducted from Montreal. Their discoveries of the western prairies of Canada and the Rocky Mountains of the United States, like so many other achievements of the French, only allowed others later to reap where they had sown. Vérendrye himself died in Montreal in 1749.
Seen in the light of this misdirection of effort of which it was the center, the picture of old French Montreal is not without a touch of pathos. Here were vast schemes for reaching the Western Sea, journeys through empty desert in pursuit of a mirage of trade and fortune that had no existence, the empty glory of maps and names — all this on the part of a community that in reality had wealth lying at its feet. Yet even such failure carries its peculiar credit and honor. It appeals to us in the same way as the likable quality seen in individuals whose careers have failed or whose achievements never got started.
We have spoken of this period as one of peace. This is true of Montreal but of course does not apply to England and France and to North America at large. Just as the question of a successor to the throne of Spain convulsed North America from 1702 to 1713, so the ravages of war must spread again (1744-48) over the question as to the succession to the throne of Austria. This time Montreal was entirely spared, and its district was almost so. An expedition under Rigaud de Vaudreuil in 1745 made a ravaging foray into the Mohawk Valley and Massachusetts, a second raid being made in 1746. This led to ravages by small Mohawk parties in which a few settlers were killed or captured at Châteauguay, at Isle Perrot, and Ste. Anne’s. The main brunt of this war fell on Acadia, where Louisburg was captured (1745) by an expedition from New England aided by the royal navy. The only other military features of Montreal in this happy period were the expeditions sent out, with success, in 1728 beyond Fort Michilimackinac against the Indians of Green Bay (the Foxes), as a means of striking the Indian peril at its source.
During the old French Regime we can hardly think of Montreal as a seaport in any proper sense or with any meaning more than that there was continuous water communication to the sea. Quebec was the ocean port and also the port at which shipbuilding, such as it was, was carried on. Even below Quebec there were no proper charts to the sea until the famous Captain James Cook charted the St. Lawrence below Quebec for Wolfe’s expedition. Between Quebec and Montreal the natural channel as yet unimproved offered no greater depth in certain stretches than eleven feet and was rendered difficult for ships under sail by shallow currents and below Three Rivers by the tide. Navigation in the French Regime had no heavier cargoes to provide for than the carriage of persons, personal goods, and the export of furs. For this purpose canoes, boats, and large boats under sail easily sufficed. References to “ships” refer to these large bateaux. “The bateau,” writes Mr. Lawrence Tombs in his admirable Port of Montreal, “was a large flat-bottomed skiff, sharp at both ends, about forty feet long and six to eight feet wide in the center, and capable of carrying about five tons of cargo. It was provided with masts and lugsails, with about fifteen feet hoist, an anchor, four oars, and six setting poles shod with iron. The bateau was manned by a crew of four men and a pilot.”
Little, therefore, could be done to improve the position of Montreal as a port from below. But already in those early days people planned its improvement from above so as to make it easier to bring the fur trade down the St. Lawrence and carry goods up. Hence the project, and to a certain extent the actuality, of a Lachine canal is among the first public enterprises of the colony. It will be recalled that the rapids of the Great Sault (Lachine Rapids) block the river above Montreal. More than that, the course of the river at the rapids is swung off so as to make it a long way round to Montreal even if one hazards the risks of shooting the rapids and incurs the labor of trekking and portaging at the side. The distance by the path of the river from the quieter water above the rapids themselves and via La Prairie Basin to Montreal is about fourteen miles down the rapids. But a straight cut across the land is only eight and three quarter miles. Moreover, the straight cut, the present bed of the Lachine Canal, is largely a natural sunken hollow very easy to turn into a watercourse. The amount of fall from the water above the rapids varies with its flood and volume. But the fall of the ground itself may be reckoned from the fact that the Bonaventure Station is forty-eight feet above sea level, Lachine Station eighty.
We have seen that a little river, Rivière St. Pierre, originally ran down this hollow and emptied into the St. Lawrence under the Pointe à Callières behind the Ilot Normandin (Market Gate Island). If one follows this river up for five or six miles one finds its source in a body of water that was a marsh or a big pond or a little lake, according to water and season. The old maps show it as Lac à l’Outre. Between this water and Lake St. Louis there is no great rise of land, and to cut a canal would be no great matter, except that in part the rise of land is rock. With such a cutting made, with the pond made permanent and the River St. Pierre deepened and cut straight, an easy passage by canoe would be substituted for an arduous effort and a dangerous risk. Hence it was that as far back as the days of Dollier de Casson (he died in 1701) efforts were made toward a canal, or at least to improve this watercourse. A system of locks to let large boats up and down was too expensive, but it was thought that even with the natural flow of water boats might go both up and down, with a minimum of portaging. A certain beginning was made, but lack of funds left the project still incomplete at the conquest.
And here we may pause a moment in the narrative, as happiness pauses on the brink of disaster, to view in some little detail the old French town of Montreal as it was in its last years of peace and allegiance, before it was overwhelmed in the British conquest.
Strangely enough, the circumstances of our present city offer a peculiar opportunity for such a retrospect. The lower part of it, the “business section” of Montreal, corresponds very closely to the area covered by the old walled town. Now this “city” shares with the “city” enclosed in London the peculiarity that many work yet almost none sleep in it, so that it falls on a Sunday to a silence and emptiness unknown elsewhere. This is true most of all in the heart of winter when the harbor is frozen over and the port deserted, the warehouses along the water front closed and tenantless, the water front itself overwhelmed in snow. At such a time the place has turned, as it were, to a ghost city of the old French Regime, whose outline it still bears, and whose old stone houses are still to be seen here and there built in and built over in its crooked streets.
